


no river can hide (the visions of cassady remix)

by portions_forfox



Category: Literary RPF
Genre: M/M, on the road
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-21
Updated: 2013-08-21
Packaged: 2017-12-24 05:14:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/935797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/portions_forfox/pseuds/portions_forfox
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>About that book you wrote.</p>
            </blockquote>





	no river can hide (the visions of cassady remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [firstaudrina](https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstaudrina/gifts).
  * Inspired by [visions of cassady](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/26286) by margottenenbaum. 



“Louis-Louis,” Neal says, showing up at Jack’s front door. Two in the afternoon -- sun is shining, sky is blue, Joan’s garden is sprouting up daffodils. Neal sauntering up the driveway, Jack leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed like he’d never been gone.

“Well, well, well,” he answers then, “if it isn’t the Second Coming.”

Neal’s thumbs are buried in the waistband of his blue jeans, his eyes are squinting in the golden sun as he ambles up to the porch. “Ain’t it more like the Sixth?” he quips. “Seventh, maybe? I lose track.”

“Yeah,” Jack agrees, laughing. Pushes off the doorway and pulls Neal in for an old slap-on-the-back embrace. “You do.”

Neal is warm against Jack’s chest, his heartbeat faster than anyone’s like it always has been and his smell like pine needles and sawdust, something from way back far into the West you couldn’t get out here.

Neal slams a big hand down on Jack’s shoulder, squeezes once, pulls him along. All the while those brown eyes squinting, grinning, scanning.

“Come on, Jackie. Get in the car.”

Across the street Mrs. Levinson whose approval Joanie craves is watering her tulips, and her head shoots up at the sound of Neal’s euphoric whoop, a bark of pure excitement and unbridled spirit, as he hops into his Ford with the top down and the door still closed; Jack grinning into the passenger seat. It occurs to Jack that when Joanie gets home Mrs. Levinson will describe the scene of the getaway, will detail Neal’s manic hands and darting eyes and dirty clothes, and Joanie’s lips will curl with the instant realization of who it is she’s describing. It occurs to Jack how little he cares. He doesn’t like that about himself, about Neal. He doesn’t like what Neal does to him sometimes.

Too late now, Neal’s revving the engine, Mrs. Levinson’s face has blanched. Jack’s hands are drumming the dashboard, a hyperactive beat, and he bursts out, “Where we headed?”

Neal slides on his black sunglasses, slips Jack a smile. “Oh, Louis-Louis,” he says. “You know better than to ask that by now.”

 

 

They’re somewhere south of Pennsylvania, the wind riding high through Neal’s hair and his sunglasses perched like ski-burns low on Neal’s nose, one hand on the wheel and one dangling out the side of the car, when Jack realizes, “I haven’t got any cash, Neal.”

Neal shrugs, unperturbed -- a general state of being for him. “That’s jus’ fine,” he drawls, that way he has of turning on his Southern twang when he wants or doesn’t want. Jack finds that when Neal’s around him he switches it on more often than not, plays into his outsider’s fascination with the dirty, dust-ridden world from which Neal hails: wide plains, jailbreaks, homemade cigarettes. And Jack buys every bit of it, he’ll admit to that -- wide-eyed, open-mouthed. He eats it up. ‘Hell,’ he told Billy once, drunken slurring tongue heavy in his mouth, ‘I write novels about it.’ Neal’s shrugging carefree now. “We’ll jus’ have to wire back home for a dollar or two once we hit Baltimore.”

Jack snorts once, derisively, at the thought of getting Joanie to come through on that. Neal just smiles knowingly, taps along. 

“Don’t pull that act with me,” Jack warns, and Neal’s smile just gets bigger.

“What act?” he wants to know.

Jack’s staring out at the road ahead now, packed with East Coast cars, and shaking his head, amused. “That _smooth_ -talkin’ cowboy act, all that Southern charm stuff. I don’t fall for it, Cassie.”

Neal laughs, snakes his car around a Ford in front. “Now, see, that’s where you’re wrong, Jackie-boy,” he asserts, waving a tanned calloused hand in Jack’s direction. 

“What,” Jack grins lopsided, “it’s not an act?”

“No, no -- of course it’s an act, you’re not wrong to say that,” and Jack’s looking now, looking sideways in the wind at Neal in his tattered glory, golden and messy and mystic behind his shades. “You’re jus’ wrong to say you don’t fall for it, my friend.”

And he turns to Jack then, his voice dripping in vim of the South. “You are my most faithful devotee.”

 

 

Jack calls his wife at a hotel in Ohio. “I’m with Neal,” he tells her.

She sighs, pure disappointment. “I know,” she says to him.

 

 

“I wrote a book about you,” Jack tells Neal, sly-eyed as he jogs out of the liquor store, tin of tobacco in his hand. Jack’s leaning on the hood of Neal’s Pontiac, squinting hard into the sun and fighting off a smirk. “And I left out all your good parts.”

Neal slides onto the shiny dusted metal next to Neal, denim thigh pressing hot into Jack’s own in the heat of the August sun. They’ve been getting further and further out west, the lines of cars growing thinner and thinner as they go. Sometimes they’ll drive for long stretches at seventy, eighty, ninety miles an hour with just an open dirt road in front of them, miles and miles of emptiness on either side, no policeman, no farmers, no nothing. It’s remarkable to Jack, the West. The concept that he and Neal in their bunkered-down lump of metal could be the only living breathing men for hundreds of miles in any direction, just him and Neal and the occasional smirk Neal tosses his way, the brief seconds-long dig of Neal’s hand into the nape of his neck. Just that, and nothing else. It’s enough to force a man to fall in love.

They’re in some two-bit town, parked just outside the liquor store, and Neal’s filthy black fingers hand Jack a lump of chew, then tip some back into his own mouth. He shifts his feet in the brown dry dust, takes off his sunglasses to rub briefly at his nose, Jack watching carefully all the while. 

“You didn’t,” Neal’s secret of a smile. “I don’t have any good parts, sonny.”

Jack starts to laugh: “Yes I did,” he says, “I -- ”

“I’ve read it,” Neal smiles, Jack falling silent, “and you didn’t.”

 

 

In North Dakota what feels like centuries ago, Neal leaned into the stars with his hands on either side of Jack’s thighs on the hood of his car and said, “You know why you find it so extraordinary?”

Jack was looking up into the ink open mouth of the sky, feeling the wheatgrass scrape his heels beneath his socks in this field so far away from anything or anyone but Neal, and he yanked himself away from the world, the ground for a moment, to smirk, “Why’s that?”

“ ’Cause you’re a New York boy,” Neal had whispered, sidled smirk near Jack’s curled lips, “through and through.”

And Jack just laughed, felt free out here beneath the wide open sky, even from Neal. “What do you know about me, Cassady?” he’d spat, and had been pleasantly surprised by the faint look of wounded disappointment which criss-crossed Neal’s face.

 

 

He thinks about that later. _‘You know why you find it so extraordinary?’_

In the moment, he’d thought Neal meant the West.

 

 

Jack’s asleep in the backseat somewhere between Kansas and Missouri when Neal stops the car and clambers into the backseat with him, limbs splayed out everywhere. The cicadas are buzzing in the night, and Jack’s mind is sleep-worn, woozy. 

“Where’ve you been, Jackie-boy?” Neal asks, lighting up a cigarette. “I’ve missed you.” Jack’s got his head slammed into the door handle and his eyes are still adjusting, to the dark, to the stillness, to the blue moonlit shape of Neal’s profile hunched around a match. 

“Where’ve _I_ been,” Jack mumbles, groggy and disjointed. “In Manhattan, same as always. Where’ve _you_ been is the question.”

“Yeah,” Neal laughs, exhaling, “it always is,” and he leans back into the seat, lifts Jack’s feet up and plops them, muddy boots and all, into his lap. Curls his arm around the empty back of the seat. 

There’s silence, for a minute, two minutes, and Jack’s eyes slip closed for a few long moments, sleep luring him back in. Then Neal speaks again, and when Jack looks up Neal’seyes are gleaming and unguarded, his smile coiled and unrepentant and his cigarette burning close down to the fingertips. Moonlight all around. 

“You know why I like you, Jackie?” Neal says, looking up into the sky. He sighs and shifts, always restless. When Jack doesn’t answer right away, Neal answers for him, says, “Because you like me too much.”

Jack sits up a little, leans his head against the doorframe. “Doesn’t everyone?” he says. It feels important then.

“Yeah,” Neal tells him, and looks straight at him -- Neal Cassady, all of him, sunglasses gone and grin raging wild and eyes looking always for a fight. It’s a lot to take in all at once. “But you’re the only one who knows it.” He beckons once with his finger, and that’s all, Jack sits up obediently and leans forward so Neal can curve a finger beneath his chin and pull him in for a lazy kiss, one hand coiled around Jack’s jaw and the other still dangling a cigarette only inches away. Neal pushes his tongue, smoke and whiskey, into Jack’s mouth, and bites hard at Neal’s bottom lip, never had much taste for courtesy. (‘I’m me,’ he’d said that night in North Dakota. ‘I’m not supposed to kiss you like a lady.’) 

“About that book,” Neal says in absolute clarity, his voice completely level as he pulls away and Jack breathes heavily, raggedly, pupils blown and vision hazy. Two minutes ago he was half asleep and it almost feels like he still is, trapped in some hazy humid Midwest fantasy, a narrative he’s written too many times not to dream about. 

Jack’s still trying to function as Neal leans over the side of the car, taps his ashes and drops his cigarette, then leans back to promptly unzip Jack’s unchanged jeans, jerk harshly on him through his underwear. 

Jack slides his freezing hands up Neal’s shirt then, pure frenzied desperation to _touch_ Neal, touch him any way he can, and that’s when Neal looks at him, his clear eyes mere inches away. 

He says, “You left out the best part.”


End file.
